This note epitomizes, for me, the problem with the whole academic
publishing business. It seems ludicrous to me that we continue to use
this distribution model when it is (a) so expensive and (b) so restrictive
in its distribution. We've created an entire ecosystem based not on what
is useful and good, but on whether or not we can convince a handful of
other people that what we've written
is sufficiently sophisticated to publish in their journals. How did those
people reach that position? By convincing earlier folks of the same thing.
These journals are so expensive that no one has access to them.
What's worse, the material in them is rarely online and thus are
not really "available" as we understand the term in 2004.

At one time, academic journals played an important role. Research was (and maybe still is) about innovation and journals were the distribution medium as well as the ranking mechanism. They were,
in some sense, the first Google because they helped solved the problem of
deciding what to pay attention to. The peer review process is the
academic journal's form of pagerank. Ideally, peer review filters ideas so
that those worthy of being read are passed through to the readers. Often
however, peer review takes on the feel of being caught up in
the folk tale of The Emperor's New Cloths. The world has entered the 21st
century and academic researchers are stuck in a world largely crafted in
the 19th.

I love doing research and I love writing. Moreover, I love letting
others hear about and hopefully get some benefit from what I do. Academic
publishing does not serve that purpose, so I blog. In fact, the primary
purpose academic publishing serves is to provide a metric for
promotion and tenure.
That's not an unworthy goal, but it is entirely artificial. When I think about
the thousands and thousands of CS researchers in the 200 or so PhD granting
institutions spending their time and energy to generate publications in
this artificial, restrictive environment, I'm struck that
society pays a high price indeed for this metric.

The price is twofold

First, the academic publishing system ensures that almost no one
will see what you write. Further, because of copyright restrictions in
almost all the large journals, you're usually not allowed to even distribute it
yourself.

Second, the academic publishing system ensures that there is a
strong barrier placed between academic researchers and other innovative
efforts in CS and IT.

The last point is unique to CS, at least among the scientific
disciplines, as far as I can tell. There is no large group of people that
I know of doing innovative work in Chemistry or Physics, for example outside of those who publish regularly in the academic journals that support those disciplines.
Sure there are some amateur astronomers and so on, but this pales in
comparison to the large group of people building innovative software. This is probably because doing innovative things on a computer is relatively cheap, safe, and accessible.
When I listen to people from the non-academic group talk about their work, I have a tough time
distinguishing it in many cases from the work going on around me at the
University except that they don't start their papers with an obligatory
section filled with greek symbols.

My fear in all of this is that academic CS researchers will become more
and more marginalized over time. Universities were once the home of
almost all open source projects and much of the software we use in the
Internet everyday (think BIND, Sendmail, DNS) has its roots in academic
work. That's not the case anymore and that's probably a good thing. There are
lots of people building cool things and I like that.

Still, what's the role of academic researchers in this game? I don't
know. I'd like to see the innovative work happening everywhere to be cross pollenating. I think the current system is broken, but I don't see clear
alternatives that also will serve as a metric that academic departments
need. I'm confident, however, that things are evolving rapidly and if
academic CS researchers want to play in the IT innovation game, we're
going to have to adapt.